LibO

Last week, we talked with The Document Foundation's marketing assistant Mike Saunders about the 1 million downloads milestone reached by the major LibreOffice 6.0 release in only two weeks after its launch, who told us that the team is already working on the next version, LibreOffice 6.1, due for release in August.

LibreOffice 6.1 will be the first major update to the 6.x series of the office suite and will add yet another layer of new features and improvements to the open-source and cross-platform office suite used by millions of computer users worldwide, and we'd like you to be the first to know about them.

The Document Foundation announced recently that its LibreOffice 6.0 open-source and cross-platform office suite reached almost 1 million downloads since its release last month on January 31, 2018.

That's terrific news for the Open Source and Free Software community and a major milestone for the acclaimed LibreOffice office suite, which tries to be a free alternative to proprietary solutions like Microsoft Office.

The 1 million downloads mark was reached just two weeks after the release of LibreOffice 6.0, which is the biggest update ever of the open-source office suite adding numerous new features and enhancements over previous versions.

LibreOffice is the power-packed free, libre and open source personal productivity suite for Windows, Macintosh and GNU/Linux, that gives you six feature-rich applications for all your document production and data processing needs: Writer: the word processor, Calc: the spreadsheet application, Impress: the presentation engine, Draw: our drawing and flowcharting application, Base: our database and database frontend, and Math: for editing mathematics.

We would like to congratulate the hard working folks behind the LibreOffice 6.0 application suite. Officially released on January 31, the site has counted almost 1 million downloads. An amazing accomplishment.

A bit earlier than expected, the first point release of the LibreOffice 6.0 open-source and cross-platform office suite popped up today on the official channels for all supported platforms, along with the fifth maintenance update to the LibreOffice 5.4 series.

LibreOffice 6.0.1 and 5.4.5 are now available for GNU/Linux, macOS, and Windows platforms with various bug and regression fixes. While a total of 75 issues were fixed in the first point of LibreOffice 6.0, the LibreOffice 5.4.5 update addresses about 69 bugs across several components of the open-source office suite. Also, the LibreOffice 6.0.1 includes an important security patch.

LibeOffice 6.0 is now available. And it's through the inevitable Korben I discovered this morning it has a builtin EPUB export. So let's take a closer look at that new beast and evaluate how it deals with that painful task. Conformant EPUB? And which version of EPUB? Reusable XHTML and CSS? We'll see.

The latest major release of LibreOffice brings better interoperability with Microsoft Office documents, ePub export, OpenPGP document signing, improved user interface and a number of other functional improvements.

As expected, LibreOffice cross-platform release is available for Windows, macOS, and Linux. You can also use its cloud version as well from any computer or web browser. There are many significant changes made to the core engine as well as the Writer, Calc, Impress/Draw modules.

OK, if you are tied at the hip to Microsoft Office I can see why you'll continue to pay year after year for your Office subscription. But, seriously, if you're not, why aren't you using the newest version of LibreOffice 6.0?

The bottom line is the open-source LibreOffice just works. I've used every office suite since WordStar and DataStar were things. LibreOffice is every bit as good as Microsoft Office and it's free to boot.

You can run LibreOffice on Linux, macOS, and Windows. You can also use on your web browser, if you deploy LibreOffice Online as software-as-a-service server on a cloud, bare-iron, or in a Docker container.

Numerous months in the making, LibreOffice 6.0 comes two and a half years after the LibreOffice 5.x series, and it's the biggest release of the open-source and cross-platform office suite so far. It introduces a revamped design with new table styles, improved Notebookbars, new gradients, new Elementary icons, menu and toolbar improvements, and updated motif/splash screen.

LibreOffice 6.0 offers superior interoperability with Microsoft Office documents and compatibility with the EPUB3 format by allowing users to export ODT files to EPUB3. It also lets you import your AbiWord, Microsoft Publisher, PageMaker, and QuarkXPress documents and templates thanks to the implementation of a set of new open-source libraries contributed by the Document Liberation project.

The major LibreOffice 6.0 release is coming next week, and The Document Foundation's Mike Saunders talked with members of the community to get their perspectives on LibreOffice's new design.

While it won't bring a massive redesign, as most users may have expected, LibreOffice 6.0 will include a few noteworthy design changes, including new table styles, new gradients, updated motif/splash screen, improved Notebookbars, menu and toolbar improvements, and the Elementary icons.

This is a short preview of how Notebookbar will look like on LibreOffice 6.0. Notebookbar is a new toolbar appearance on LibreOffice since version 5.3 that look similar to Microsoft Office 2007 Ribbon Toolbar. It's tabbed, column based, and categorized. We can use Notebookbar on Writer, Calc, and Impress already. It's still a experimental feature for now, so it's not recommended for production use. However, it's already good looking at LibreOffice 6.0 and we need to see more. I show here screenshots of Writer's Notebookbar from all tabs with some commentary.

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